Fontech
by Jenna Wilder
Summary: Seven years of teaching fontech to the boy calling himself Asch, and Dist has had plenty of time to watch the boy accept his lot in life and grow up. Slight spoilers, covers the seven years after the kidnapping. Read and review, please!


**A/N: I'm back from my unexplained disappearance! XD It's called writer's block and owning a copy of Tales of the Abyss, which I've been playing with my brother. Thus, you may be seeing an increase in TotA fanfics for a while... who knows? I owe GoldenTalesGeek a Kraine fanfiction, so we'll see. **

**... speaking of which, I need to go email him. .:sheepish grin:. Sorry, GTG.**

**Word count: 3200-some. **

**Disclaimer: I don't own TotA or any of the characters. Wouldn't mind it, but all I own is a licensed copy of the game. If you see any of the characters running around unclaimed (yeah right, with all the fangirls), let me know!**

**Oh yes, and this is a pairingless fanfic. Dist and Asch are main characters, but for all you rabid yaoi fans, this is NOT a DistxAsch story. Ew.  
**

**---**

_An unearthly scream of pain lingered on as the redhead arched as far as his bonds would allow him, emptying his lungs only to fill them again. The complex cuffs pinning him down to the surface held him tight, and he struggled in vain. The scream went on and on, a wordless plea that brought involuntary tears to Dist's eyes. Replication was a difficult business, and the technology available at the moment was not enough to make it painless. He brushed aside the tears with a white-gloved hand, trying to focus on the work in front of him. Here, surrounded by cold steel, he was in his element, but as the replicator cruelly stripped away the replica data from Luke fon Fabre, he could not concentrate on the bizarre arrangement of fontech machinery. _

_The machine came to rest with a grinding noise – he would have to remember to oil it; the bloody thing couldn't make more than once cycle without requiring a massive amount of specialized oil – but Luke's screams went on and on. Choral Castle might be massive, but Dist would have wagered his chair that anyone within fifteen miles of the crumbling building could hear._

_Finally, when the pain indicator strapped to Luke's bare chest dropped to a fairly low forty-five units – it had shot up past two hundred and stayed there during the procedure; any more, and his body would have shut itself down – the boy stopped screaming and lay there, panting and occasionally struggling against the cuffs around his wrists and ankles. He had spirit; that much was certain._

_"Please… whoever you are, let me go…" he begged, sounding as if he was fighting back sobs. _

_Dist flicked several switches into place, preparing the next part of Van's operation, then stood. The cuffs were extremely hard to take apart for an amateur, but Dist had designed these himself. A moment later, all four catches had been undone, and he was helping a shaky redhead off the replication surface. _

_"Thank you…"_

_"Don't thank me," Dist replied, setting the boy down in his chair and grabbing for the nearby first-aid kit. "I cannot guarantee you anything." He began tending to the redhead's wounds – punctures from needles, bruises from the kidnapping, self-inflicted gouges along his hands from fingernails, red and raw marks on his wrists and ankles from fighting against the restraints._

_Confused, Luke looked up from the strips of bandage being wound around his hands, but nothing made it from his mouth as Van himself entered the room._

_"I take it from the lack of screaming that the first half is over, Saphir?"_

_Dist winced at the use of his childhood name, quickly slamming a mental door on the memories that welled up. "I told you not to call me that, Vandestelca." _

_"Sorry," Van chuckled, not sounding apologetic at all. "Have you made the replica yet?"_

_"Replica? Master Van, what's going on…?" Luke asked hoarsely._

---

He had such a lost look in his eyes, as if everything precious to him had been ripped away in one single moment, then destroyed in front of his eyes. Not that Dist could blame him; with the creation of the replica-Luke, the original Luke fon Fabre had been informed that he would no longer be allowed to return to the home which he had been torn from. Add that to the fact that it had been his beloved teacher, Van, that had done the kidnapping, and Luke was lost indeed.

"Luke fon Fabre?" Dist asked softly, hoping that the name would stir the boy out of his despair. He carried a tray with a bowl of noodle-soup and a pair of chopsticks – others might laugh at him, but Dist the Rose was a terrible cook and didn't care in the least.

"Don't call me that!" the redhead snapped viciously, rounding on the older man. "I am no longer Luke, son of Duke Fabre! That name was given to that trash that's taken my place! _He_ is the light of the sacred flame, not me!"

"What should I call you, then?" Dist continued calmly, aching inside. It had been _his_ terrible machine that forced this child from his home, torn him apart from the inside out!

"Asch," was the reply as the former Luke turned back to staring out off the balcony in the direction of Baticul. "I am only the remnant of the flame."

Setting the tray down, the scientist picked up the chopsticks and held them out. "You need to eat, or you'll kill yourself. With the strain placed on your body from the replication process – "

A strangled sob cut him off; Asch turned his back to the silvery-white-haired man, scrubbing furiously at his eyes. "Will I ever be able to go back to my family? And… and Natalia… I just want to let them know that I'm okay. Natalia… she's probably arranging a search party right now… even if she's only eleven, she knows what strings to pull."

Dist bit his lower lip, drawing blood before even trying to speak. "I… I don't think you will. Van wouldn't allow it. The official story is that Malkuth has kidnapped you, and you've been so traumatized that you've forgotten everything."

_"Traumatized?" _Asch echoed, sounding angry. "I've been through more than that inferior copy of me ever will, and I've still got all my memory!"

"Perhaps, but in cases of extreme trauma, patients have been known to surrender their memories – voluntarily or involuntarily, depending on the severity of the situation – and Van is counting on the Kimlascan doctors to remember that." Dist replied before thinking, the scientist in him speaking out.

"So… I'll never be able to see Mother and Father again?"

"Probably only from a distance, if that."

The redhead's pretense at strength and bravery crumbled; he turned to Dist with tears spilling from strikingly green eyes. He flung his arms around the scientist, shaking with suppressed wails. Every fonon in Dist's body ached in sympathy – he could tell that the boy was terrified, even if he would never admit it to himself.

"Please… please, let this all be a nightmare… I'll even stop teasing Guy if I can just wake up in my own bed…!" Asch begged, refusing to let go of his death grip around Dist's waist.

After several minutes, his sobs subsided and he slowly released the older man. "If it's not a nightmare," he began, sniffling, "then that dreck in my place is going to be getting lessons from Van, right?"

Dist smiled ruefully, noting the boy's dropping – accidental, or purposeful? – of the honorific "Master" that he had before attached to the man's name. "Yes, I believe so. Why?"

"Teach me." The redhead drew himself up to his full height, enough to bring the top of his head even with the decorative bands on the sleeves of Dist's jacket. "I don't care what, as long as I know more than that trash does. I'll learn from you and Van, and whoever else wants to teach me. I'll prove that nobody can replace me!"

"Fine," Dist agreed soothingly. Jade had always hated teaching, he remembered before forcing his fonder memories of the Fonist back into their corner of his mind. "But first, eat."

Asch wolfed down the ramen noodles, a determined look conquering the tears on his face.

---

"No, no, no! Connect those _there_, or your energy core will explode in your face and destroy your machine!" Dist felt a migraine coming on, one of the massive ones that forced him to retire to bed early or force down one of those disgustingly-sweet gels.

Obediently, Asch switched the wires around, connecting them where the scientist pointed. As the core lit up and whirred to life, he grinned savagely. "How's that?"

Pride surged unbidden through the white-haired man. "Excellent, considering that this is your first shot at constructing your own power source. However, the wiring here is shoddy, and if you had connected these here instead of there, you could have doubled the output of power," he replied, forgetting his headache in the excitement of his student's achievements.

Asch drummed his fingers on the table, thinking over the machine that lay in front of him. Dist had happily taken apart some of his older machines to introduce the young man to fontech, and they had been focusing on bringing one of the oldest constructions to life with a simple energy core.

"Is that all you care about?" he asked after a moment, studying the interconnected wires and crystals. "I mean, the way I did it, it's going to last longer without burning out the fonstones and destroying itself from the inside out. If you connect the red to the blue here, you'll double the power, but this could be a simple machine that doesn't need extra kick."

"It depends on what you're using it for," Dist shot back, overjoyed that Asch had the technical skills to spot that so early on. "If you're using it for a simple task, like toasting bread or boiling water, life length is what you should aim for. However, simple as this machine is, it is meant to perform more than one task at once, and therefore it requires more power to run everything."

Asch sighed in agreement and took everything apart again, yelping as one of the frayed wires shocked him. "What is this machine made for, anyways? I've been over it a hundred times if once, and I can't figure it out. This looks like a place to load arrows, and this like a training dummy's sword, but it's so strangely put together that it can't be that simple, can it?"

Red eyes flickered through Dist's memory as he looked over the machine. Strange indeed; it was a training machine he had designed for a fonist. The variety of weapons it carried demanded a large collection of spells to escape unscathed, but the one he had designed it against had fought his way out of its entire arsenal while the would-be emperor watched, laughing at Dist's pathetic effort to design a machine that could best Jade, and – no!

"It's supposed to help fonists master their artes," Dist replied, shaking his head to banish the memory of Jade and Peony making fun of the machine once Jade had taken it apart completely with a nasty fonic arte. Their mockery had been nothing short of torture.

"Oh really? I guess the arrows would force you to use a shield arte, and the sword here would probably require fire or earth… yeah, okay! I think I see it now!" Asch exclaimed, turning it over and around on the table to study the workings of the reconstructed machine.

After making sure that the redhead was distracted in improving the machine, Dist allowed himself to think back on his days under Nebilim. He hated remembering the ridicule that his peers had put him through, but it seemed necessary if he wanted to best Jade someday. He and Jade had been friends, once, until Peony had come along – perhaps it had been the comparison between the emperor-to-be and a scrawny, bespectacled child who enjoyed building things. In any case, the Jade-Saphir team became Jade-Peony-Saphir, and then quickly faded into merely Jade and Peony. Nephry, in the grade above the three boys, had time to stop her brother's teasing when she was around, but the ridicule only increased after that, due to Peony's affection towards his best friend's sister.

Dist hated Peony with all his heart, and he wasn't sure what he felt for Jade – he wanted to hate him for abandoning him, but it seemed impossible. Something in Dist simply would not allow him to hate him as completely as he did Peony.

Asch drew him back to the present with a shout of happiness as the training machine blinked on. It immediately sprayed arrows in every direction, but that wasn't enough to dampen the redhead's spirits as he ducked and slammed the switch back into the OFF position.

_Twelve years old, and already showing enormous potential for fontech,_ Dist sighed to himself, content. He would train this boy in his arts if it killed him.

---

Waiting proved to be more of a chore than Dist had ever enjoyed. He hated waiting almost as much as he hated Peony, which was saying something. Consequently, he was working on his latest fontech machine while waiting for Asch to get back from his lesson with Van – it was a good distraction, and he was getting work done.

He could feel the massive load of stimulants he'd dosed himself with beginning to wear off, but before he could re-introduce caffeine to his bloodstream, sleep overtook him. It had been nearly a week since he'd actually had a full night's sleep, and the stimulants could only go so far…

He awoke to a pair of emerald-green eyes, wondering how in the name of fomicry he had gotten into his bed, before associating the emeralds with Asch and sitting up straight. "Your lesson – I forgot – !" he yelped.

"Oh, shut up," Asch ordered sternly, trying very hard not to smile. "You've been asleep for five days, and it doesn't matter to me if you're another ten minutes late to my lesson."

Five _days? _He had wasted five perfectly good days _sleeping?_ Blast!

As if in reply, the swordsman tossed him a tiny bundle of wires. "You were working on that in your sleep, believe it or not, and you only stopped when I took it from you and dragged you to bed. Your chair wouldn't even help me get you here."

Dist examined the bundle, answering absentmindedly. "Of course it wouldn't, it's controlled mentally, and I was apparently asleep." The set of wires and crystals in his hands was small, but powerful enough to give life to one of his most massive creations. How had he managed that in his _sleep?_ "Are you sure you didn't build this to make me feel better about wasting five days in bed?"

The redhead snorted in reply. "I looked it over, and I understand the concept now, but there's no way I could have thought of that without you looking over my shoulder."

Tumbling unceremoniously out of bed and untangling himself from the clinging bedsheets, Dist slipped his jacket, gloves, and shoes on. His red dress shirt and dark pants were wrinkled, but they would have to do while he tested this!

The fifteen-year-old followed him back to the lab, relaying Van's latest orders as they walked. "The other God-Generals are assembled near Keterburg, and we're supposed to rendezvous with them in two days – it was a week, but you slept through most of that. Shouldn't be that hard, considering we're already at Mount Roneal, but try to keep that in mind, would you?"

Dist nodded, still looking over the energy core. Who would have thought that connecting complementary colors would produce such power? "Right, right. Don't worry, I'll be there. You'd best worry about yourself."

"Me? I don't get distracted. Is that why you picked the name 'Dist'? Because you're always 'dist'racted by something?"

"Shut up," the older man ordered with a snort of laughter. "It has nothing to do with that."

---

Seventeen years old and burning with a passionate hatred for the replica of himself, Asch had certainly flung himself into studies of all sorts. Fontech and fomicry from Dist, swordplay from Van, sharpshooting and projectile weapons from Legretta – he'd even attempted learning Daathic fonic artes from Sync. That hadn't worked out very well. Largo the Black Lion had built up the young man's fighting stamina, and Arietta, the newest addition to the God-Generals, had helped him with agility training.

In short, Asch was a weapon all on his own. A sword only increased his deadly skill; he was most at home with a sword in his hands, but hand-to-hand he was more than a match for any God-General. Dist wasn't really surprised at the lengths that hatred could drive someone – he was used to the idea of detesting Jade, and knew it had allowed him to create the machines he did – but the enormous amount of physical energy that the redhead had constantly amazed him. Even when completely stationary, he could move like a whiplash – and every movement was calculated to kill.

Still, Dist dueled him occasionally, if only to find out what he had to bolster next in his machines. When Asch discovered that jamming a fifth-fonon enhanced weapon into the barrel of Dist's fonic cannon resulted in an explosion that nearly destroyed one of the labs, the silvery-haired man groaned and set to rebuilding the cannon with a specialized shield installed. After that, the redhead had destroyed his favorite mode of transportation – his precious chair! – and he'd rebuilt that and enhanced its speed and maneuvering capabilities.

Their daily lessons had become less of a teaching session and more of a running fontech experiment; Dist had passed on enough of his knowledge that Asch could provide an excellent source of ideas. All in all, the scientist mused, Asch had outstripped his replica a hundred times over. Of course, he had to take into account the replica's empty slate of a mind – having to learn to speak, read, and write took time, after all – but even so, Luke had mastered basic skills and not much else. Whether it was because he was locked up or he was simply against learning, Dist didn't know.

"What are you thinking about now?" Asch asked suddenly, studying his companion with interest. "You've got that funny look on your face that usually means I'll be trying to keep my head from getting blown off by your new-and-improved fonic cannon, or something like that."

"Hm? Oh… no, nothing like that… I was just remembering seven years back," he replied, noting Asch's sudden grimace. "Don't make that face. You've advanced so far, you're nothing like who you used to be. I'm… impressed."

"It takes a lot to impress _you_, old man." Asch chuckled at Dist's look of outrage. "I know, I know, you're only in your thirties. Compared to me, you're ancient."

"Fine, I'll stop praising you if that's what you want so badly," Dist said huffily, crossing his arms and trying not to grin. They'd only been through this a hundred times.

"Forgive me, oh wise and youthful master," Asch replied in turn, bowing low.

The scientist turned back to his student, looking thoughtful. "Did I ever tell you that I'm proud of you?" he asked after a moment.

"What? No, not really. Not even Van says stuff like that," the redhead answered incredulously.

Dist smiled. "Well, I am. You've come far, and somebody needs to tell you. It seems I'm the only one willing to do it."

"That's because you're the most feminine of everyone here. Even Legretta is more masculine than you are!" Asch seemed stunned by the compliment, but not enough to dull his sharp tongue.

"Right, see if I ever tell you that again."

"I'm just kidding and you know it. …Thanks, Dist." They returned to their respective machines, both grinning. After a moment, Asch reached over and used his sonic screwdriver to knock Dist's hands aside and point. "Don't connect those there, they'll blow up in your face."

Dist looked down, startled – he had indeed put it together incorrectly, and he kicked himself for the mistake. Apparently, musing over one's student didn't help concentration at all.

These seven years had been worth it, though. Asch had grown into a man far better than the boy he'd once been.

And, Dist laughed to himself as he re-wired the machine and carved a glyph into the side, he wouldn't trade those years for anything.

---

**A/N: Read and review, it makes me happy. Yes, I like Dist. Deal with it. XD I don't claim any of this to be what really happened (how'm I supposed to know?) but I liked the idea.**

**Oh, and please forgive any words that seem stuck together. My spacebar button hates me, but I think Word caught most of the errors. .:sweatdrop:.**


End file.
